Decius6i5 writes: This summer the WikiTrust team made the English language Wikipedia accessible through their Firefox plugin, which uses a reputation system to highlight untrustworthy text. I thought, made using this plugin I could read Wikipedia articles about politicians without being misled by vandals, so I created Wiki Voter Guide which uses Project Vote Smart's API to look up Wikipedia articles about candidates by ZIP code. Turns out, most local races aren't covered in Wikipedia yet, but I'd like to know what Slashdot readers think about all of this. With the help of reputation systems can Wikipedia become a useful way to research political candidates or is politically motivated vandalism an insurmountable problem?

Politician X has also claimed that he once kicked a puppy because it was cool, while singing "I can do whatever I want, those idiots will still vote for me"

I don't know how it decides whether a source is trustworthy or not. I would assume it uses something similar to Google's page rank (if reputable sites link to it, it is reputable) - however since even large news companies are politically biased, I'm pretty sure that nowhere is really safe or reputable anymore.

An overview of the wikitrust algorithms is here. [wikitrust.net]
In a nutshell, new text is less likely to be reliable than stuff that has been subjected to a lot of peer review and survived.
Couple that with the matter of whether or not your edits tend to get reverted...